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First post, by Alkarion

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As reading the forums on other sites (mostly theelderscrolls.com) is rather depressing (forum topics: teh greatest game eva!; oblivion sucks big times; is it just me?), I would like to here opinions from our civilized Vogons community here. Particularly, I'm interested in gameplay related topics since I'm already convinced that the graphics are superb.

Sadly, I can't play the game myself since I only have a Radeon 9000 and no time anyway. Still, I'm following the Oblivion news for a rather long time now since some major RPG elements seem to be implemented right in Oblivion for the first time in many years. One of the major disappointment of Morrowind were the NPCs, who just stood around all day (and night), just waiting for you to converse with them. Bethesda promised to make Oblivion much more alive with their Radiant AI, and I think they have succeeded to some degree. Still I hear lot of complaints from the various forums about Radiant AI not living up to the hype. So I would be interested in hearing your opinion about that as well.

My hopes are that Oblivion is the first RPG to supercede Ultima VII in every aspect (especially the way the game universe seemed to be alive and invited to interact with it). Is Oblivion able to fulfill these hopes? What do you die-hard, experienced gamers think?

Reply 1 of 25, by DosFreak

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One of the major disappointment of Morrowind were the NPCs, who just stood around all day (and night), just waiting for you to converse with them. Bethesda promised to make Oblivion much more alive with their Radiant AI, and I think they have succeeded to some degree. Still I hear lot of complaints from the various forums about Radiant AI not living up to the hype. So I would be interested in hearing your opinion about that as well.

The thing is that the RAI is not supposed to stand out or be noticeable, it suppose to act more true to life. Now personally for me I really don't give a shit if a NPC does their thing if I'm not around. As long as they act like a normal person would do as long as I'm within the vicinity of them or if their interactions provide an enhancement to gameplay then that's all I want from them.

I've played very little of Oblivion (just picked it up last night and have been experimenting mostly with graphics options), but from what I've seen so far with my quick interaction with the NPC's and which are most important to me:

1. No more huge ass list of conversational options. You only have the dialogue options that you need to use for a specific NPC.

2. The NPC characters actually have expressions in their faces. If they are angry, then they show anger...if they are happy they show happiness.

3. NPC's are much more reactive toward's theft or the appearance of theft. If you enter a shop and sneak around, then the shopkeeper will follow you around and eye you suspiciously.

My hopes are that Oblivion is the first RPG to supercede Ultima VII in every aspect (especially the way the game universe seemed to be alive and invited to interact with it). Is Oblivion able to fulfill these hopes? What do you die-hard, experienced gamers think?

Can't really say since I haven't really gotten into the game yet but....

No standalone RPG as of yet has ever truly felt dynamic to me. Dynamic means to me that I can mount a siege on a castle. Use battering rams and actually smash the drawbridge down, go into the castle and burn and destroy anything I find, making the game truly destructible.

Once inside I would like consequences. If I killed the Captain of the guard and the King then I want to hear the Captain's wife sobbing and crying and possibly wanting to kill herself (nah, I'm not evil and do I really want to see that last part? Not really but admit it, it would be cool).

If I do destroy the castle and most of the people in it, I don't want the NPC's milling around as normal. I want them to run screaming in fear to the next town/village/whatever.....

I guess I'll see since I hope to play the game today.

The main problem with games that offer these kinds of NPC features is that I am so used to games with non-dynamic gameplay, that it is easy to dismiss things. Oh, the NPC doesn't do that? It's normal...it's just a game. I can't destroy that wooden door? Normal....never gonna change. I can't dig a hole in the earth and dump a corpse in it? Normal.

Sigh.....so much that could be done in RPG's if we just think about it. Man, we should come up with a feature list for a perfect RPG.....not comparing it to CRPG's but paper RPG's and not letting or experience with last games impose limitations on our thoughts.

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Reply 2 of 25, by DosFreak

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Some pics

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Reply 3 of 25, by Alkarion

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Nice. Have you already been to other places of Cyrodiil? I'd like to see some pics from the landscape (not forests, those were covered enough). There were some grassy hills in one of the trailers and I'd like to know if there is snow in the north. To my knowledge, mountains still look just like big hills, though.

Reply 4 of 25, by DosFreak

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TIP: Be sure to carry a bow and tons of arrows with ya when you go cave searching. They come in reaaaalllyy handy.

I never really bothered with ranged weapons in RPG's before but it looks like Oblivion will change that. It feels so good to take out one of those jumping rats with one arrow. (and the above tip is not for killing things)

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Reply 5 of 25, by DosFreak

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Some performance tips:

The following options affected performance the most on my system:

These settings are for outside use. With indoor I never have any problem with choppiness at full game settings.

The biggest performance impact will be by the FADE/DISTANCE settings in the VIDEO menu in the game. Decreasing these sliders will give you a major performance boost.

.INI tweaks

By default the ground textures do not have details up to a set distance from you. This looks like crap. Unfortunately if you do not have enough CPU processing power then you'll have to either: 1. Live with it. 2. Increase the value resulting in a MAJOR loss of FPS.

; Default values
uNumDepthGrids=3
uGridsToLoad=5

Beware: Modifying these values can mess up the water textures. When you stand close to the water you'll be able to see under the surface of the water clearly as if the water is not there.

;How much to preload into memory. Remember Windows takes up memory too so be sure to include that
;value as well in your calculations!
iPreloadSizeLimit=26214400

[OPENMP]
;Supposedly increases FPS but had no effect on my XP 2800. "MP" is probably multiple processor.
;increase values for better performance.
iThreads=3
iOpenMPLevel=10

My system specs:
XP 2800+
1GB DDR 333
ASUS A7N8X
ATI X800 486C/560M
Catalyst 6.13

On this system the game is held back by the processor. Except for the settings mentioned above I have every other setting in the game maxed (I disabled shadows too since I never used them but that only gives back mabye 1-3fps) and am playing the game at 1600x1200 @ 2xAA.

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Reply 6 of 25, by Xian97

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I just started playing it and my initial impressions are very positive. I probably have played 3-4 hours so far. Character creation is very customizable, you can easily spend a half hour just tweaking your character's appearance trying out the different options. The tutorial and starter dungeon were very well done. I remember in Daggerfall getting poisoned in the starter dungeon and never being able to reach the first town before dying and having to restart.

One big improvement over the previous games is the addition of an indicator on your compass showing the direction you need to go on the currently selected quest. I found myself wandering around aimlessly in Morrowind frequently trying to find where I was supposed to go.

A minor complaint is you can only have 8 hotkeys assigned to the number keys. I assume this is because of the D pad on the Xbox only having 8 directions. I wonder if there is more dumbing down of the interface later on that I haven't encountered to maintain consistency with the Xbox 360 version.

Another minor complaint is that when I came out of the starter dungeon it was night and raining. I think it would have been much more of a "wow" factor if I had emerged into the light for the first glimspe of the outdoor scenery.

Overall I am impressed and I forsee many hours of playing it. I have played every Elder Scrolls game since Arena, and Oblivion has captivated right from the start. The others took much longer to really get involved in.

Reply 7 of 25, by HunterZ

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I've played Arena, Daggerfall, Battlespire (side game) and Morrowind when they were all new-ish, so I was looking forward to Oblivion. I just got a new computer recently (AMD x2 and Geforce 7800GTX - still need to post the specs on the specs forum) so it runs decent (20-30fps outside, 30-60 inside at 1920x1200).

Impressions:
Gameplay:
- No handholding at the beginning! YES! This is how games should be! Throw the player into a dungeon and let them figure out how to kill and loot (well, it does pop up a tip screen now and then, but it's not too distracting)
- The quests are rough around the edges. Haven't gotten very far yet (spent time in and around Imperial City before going to that other town for the main quest line).
- Interface is good, except that you can't use the keyboard to exit menus (except when you can use the Tab key to do it) and the drop key (shift+click) was unintuitive.
- Controls are decent. They really should have implemented weapons swapping by now, but didn't (maybe you can with hotkeys?)
- I miss being able to ask people for directions to shops
- Game is only slightly less static than Morrowind. Arena and Daggerfall felt more dynamic with random monsters, loot, and dungeons everywhere. I guess it's a tradeoff and having everything hand-crafted gives the game world a higher level of detail. However, it kills replay value to know that I can always go to crate X in town Y by shop Z and find 3 gold.
- Making your character's face is very fun. This was something I always felt was too limited in the previous TES games. I should post pics of the two characters I made 😀
- They've got the same open-endedness to character design. Instead of the questions thing, the game tries to guess what class you are by observing your play style in the beginning dungeon (the sewers). It picked a monk for me even though I never used hand-to-hand combat, so I made a custom class instead. I know that if I make it far into the game, class will no longer matter and I'll be a flying supermage swordfighter marksman champion because that's just how recent TES games work.
- I don't like that you can't rotate the camera around to see the front of your character in third-person view.

Video:
- The distant textures look ugly. I know there are tweaks but they sacrifice FPS. I've done threading and D3D render frames ahead tweaks though and they help.
- If I crank up the Anisotropic Filtering (not to be confused antialiasing) it looks ugly (mipmap banding even with trilinear enabled). I think the engine is over-optimized to the default setting.
- Shadows look ugly on faces sometimes even with filtering set to high. I guess that's the price you pay for dynamic shadows.
- Water textures messed up on me the first time I played, but haven't seen that issue since. Reflections are very low-detail.

Sound:
- The game has great 5.1 sound, even in the movies!
- If you use FFDSHOW for mp3 audio on your system, the game will use it too, so be careful or you might have 50 FFDSHOW icons in your system tray.

Other:
- I've heard that the game doesn't take advantage of SLI. If it did, I'd buy a second video card right now.
- If you use HDR or bloom, you can't do FSAA unless maybe you have a really really new high-end ATI card. I've only tried HDR and it looks pretty good.
- You can "accidentally" knock items off into a corner in a shop and then distract the shopkeeper (make them walk over to the other end of the store by hiding around a corner), then run back and steal the item.

Reply 9 of 25, by DosFreak

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Alkarion wrote:

Nice. Have you already been to other places of Cyrodiil? I'd like to see some pics from the landscape (not forests, those were covered enough). There were some grassy hills in one of the trailers and I'd like to know if there is snow in the north. To my knowledge, mountains still look just like big hills, though.

Yeah, I was in the mountains yesterday and there is plenty of snow. 😉 I'll see if I can take a pic next time I'm playing.

IIRC, Morrowind didn't really have mountains just big hills....the mountains in Oblivion are much better.

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Reply 10 of 25, by HunterZ

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Everyone post pics of your characters too, if you spent time customizing them 😀

Off-topic: Hey DosFreak, looking at your avatar, you'll probably be interested to know that I named my new computer Shodan (I name my computers after artificial intelligences - my last one was Daedalus from Deus Ex 😀).

Reply 11 of 25, by DosFreak

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I spent mabye 10-15 minutes playing around with the face customization feature but it really wasn't my bag. Way too much work to waste on something you'll rarely see. I did come up with this though which suits my tastes just fine.

She's a Wood Elf, Thief. Currently at Level 4.

So far I've beaten the first Oblivion gate and found another in the mountains which I've beat too. I've heard that the Oblivion gates are ALOT harder once you level up more....I certainly hope so because so far they were pathetically easy.

I also recently ran into a problem where if I ever entered a town the guard's would arrest me for having stolen something.....Odd thing is that I didn't have any stolen items on me and the only time I played around with stealing stuff was earlier in the game when I was experimenting and I would always reload my game and check with the shopkeeper/guards around me to make sure that I wasn't showing up as a Thief......The big problem was that I didn't have any money and I the guard's do not accept your inventory as money so you only have 2 options. "Go to Jail" or "Resist Arrest". I finally had to use the Travel option to go back to the town next to the first Oblivion gate, sell off enough of my stuff to get 1,000 gold (luckily I already had 800 gold and some soul gems). Then I simply entered another town and payed my 1,000 bounty......it sure would be nice to know who placed the bounty and for what....

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Reply 12 of 25, by DosFreak

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Call Steed Mod
http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/index.php? … howtopic=303724

Suggest this at the Ars forums a couple of days ago. Good to see it show up so fast. Ha Ha poor XBOX 360 users! I'm much happier with the game now with this mod.

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Reply 13 of 25, by HunterZ

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Here are my characters. The first is my main character, Hevanus, who is a custom class that I called Ranger. The second is Kitara, whom I haven't played at all but merely made as an experiment in female human (Breton) face creation.

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Reply 14 of 25, by doomer

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I just finished Oblivion. I had a love-hate relationship with this game at the beginning but turned out to like it a lot after all. The game is just cool. The only thing that I disliked was the total lack of puzzles. In addition, there was an obscure side quest which I abandoned because it got frustrating.

Now with the good sides. The game looks and sounds great. Character customization, development, skills, and so on are excellent, in fact I just used the default Imperial face for my warrior character, otherwise I would have lost an hour tweaking just the face. The action is also nicely done with all the swings, power attacks, the blocking but it tends to get really difficult if you drag the slider too much to the right. 😉

There is a lot of freedom, you can do pretty much whatever you like. As a matter of fact, you can probably spend months if you try to complete all side quests. The full speech is also impressive; some characters' voices can seem identical, but the acting is good. A great game indeed, and if you don't need puzzles in an rpg game, you're sure to like it even more. 😀

I will now try to finish Arena. The previous time I played it I probably got to 70% but some monsters became unbeatable. Now I'll try again and start from scratch. 😀

Reply 15 of 25, by DosFreak

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Wait a sec...The game came out last Monday? and you just blazed through the main mission and did a couple of side quests? What a waste.....

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Reply 16 of 25, by HunterZ

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That's the way a lot of RPGs are - if you just stick to the main quest you can finish them in a weekend. For me it's all about exploration though, so I rarely finish such games.

Reply 17 of 25, by DosFreak

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Yeah, I played Morrowind and beat it but I didn't really spend much time enjoying it since this was before all of the mods came out and my character became super-powerful way too fast.

This time I started out as a Thief because I was hoping they'd have more restrictions on thieving than in Morrowind (which they do). I'm also taking my time and purposely not spending time leveling up and stealing super-powerful weapons, nor using super-powerful magic/enchantments. Heck, I don't even use that Travel feature unless I really really have to. Trying to play Oblivion as realisticly as possible without ruining the fun.

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Reply 18 of 25, by doomer

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DosFreak wrote:

Wait a sec...The game came out last Monday? and you just blazed through the main mission and did a couple of side quests? What a waste.....

Errr... yeah. 😉 I like following a story, and I like something happening in front of me. The thing with the side quests is that they are like go here, kill things, go back, go somewhere else, kill more things, pick up a super obvious item, bring it back to me, repeat. I would get terribly bored if I do this 500+ times. I enjoyed the main story as that is where I'm usually having a great time with a game (unless a game forces you to do optional quests in order to do the main quest). I don't see much point in doing a countless number of side quests.

Reply 19 of 25, by DosFreak

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From what I've heard the side quests are not the standard side-quests in most RPG's, they usually have a twist. I really haven't had the time to try them out yet since I've mostly been exploring.

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